AdRoastHow to audit your LinkedIn ads against your ICP
Most B2B ad audits grade the creative: the hook, the image, the CTA button. The audit that actually moves pipeline grades something else. The match between what the ad says and who you really sell to. Here is the method, step by step, that you can run by hand today.
Click-through rate, cost per click, and cost per lead all tell you the same thing: the ad is interesting. None of them tell you it is interesting to the right person. An ad can win cheap clicks from students, job seekers, and competitors, look healthy in the dashboard, and still starve your pipeline. Buyer fit is the number that separates a busy ad account from a working one, and almost nobody scores it.
So the goal of this audit is not "is the ad good". It is "would the one person who can sign the contract stop, read, and feel like this was written for them". Everything below is built around that single question.
Before you start
You need your ICP written down, and written tightly. Not a page of adjectives. One sentence with three things in it: the role of the person who feels the pain, the company they work at (stage, size, or category, whatever actually predicts a fit), and the problem they already know they have. If your ICP reads like "innovative security teams that value trust", the audit will be mush, because you can never test an ad against a mood. You can test it against "a VP of Security at a Series B SaaS company who just failed a SOC 2 renewal".
The 5 steps
Pull every live ad. Open the LinkedIn Ad Library, search your company name, and list every creative that is actually active. Not the ones you think are running. The ones live right now. Teams are almost always surprised by what is still spending.
Write your buyer in one sentence. Role, company, known problem. If you cannot get it into one sentence, stop: that is your first and biggest finding, and no ad audit will fix a fuzzy buyer.
Score each ad on one question. Would that exact person stop scrolling because they feel seen? Not "is it clever", not "do I like it". Score every ad 0 to 10 on recognition. A 9 names the buyer's real problem in the first line. A 3 could be running for any company in any category.
Follow the click. Open the landing page each ad points to and look at the first screen only. Does it repeat the promise the ad just made, in roughly the same words? Or does it change the subject to a generic homepage, a feature tour, or a blog post? A strong ad handing off to a page about something else is where most of the budget quietly leaks.
Rank and cut. Sort your ads by fit score. The bottom of that list is spending real money teaching the wrong people about a product they will never buy. Rewrite the message to your actual buyer, or turn the ad off. Both are progress. Leaving it is not.
Cheap clicks from the wrong buyer are the most expensive thing in the account. You pay for them twice: once at the auction, and again in the pipeline that never shows up.Marina Kogan
What a failing audit looks like
You do not need a scorecard to feel it. These are the patterns that show up again and again when the audit goes badly:
- ! Feature ads that never name the buyer, only the product.
- ! One landing page catching the clicks from eight different ads about eight different things.
- ! Clever hooks that would work just as well for a competitor in another category.
- ! Proof and logos aimed at a persona you do not actually sell to.
If two or more of those are true, your ICP-fit problem is bigger than any single creative, and rewriting one headline will not save it. The fix is upstream, in who the whole account is talking to.
Or run it automatically
Doing this by hand is worth it once, because you learn what to look for. After that, AdRoast does the same five steps from just your website URL: it pulls your live LinkedIn and Google ads, infers your ideal buyer, scores every ad against that buyer, follows each click, and hands you the exact fix for the weakest ones. The first audit is free. See real examples of the scoring on the teardowns.
See where your own ads leak
AdRoast pulls your live LinkedIn and Google ads from just your website, scores each against your buyer, and shows the exact fix. First roast is free.
Roast your ads free →Keep reading
Clicks but no pipeline: why B2B ads leak after the click
The four places the funnel breaks between the ad and the form, and how to find yours.
What is an ad teardown, and how to do one
Why grading the ad and the landing page as one unit beats a creative critique.